Go! has sung the praises of local producer Munk ever since we heard his CD ''Anime Sweetheart,'' overflowing with dizzy beats and hooks. Arbiter of cool that we are, we saw others jumping on the bandwagon, and buzz began to build. He crafts his music with intelligence and panache. Can superstar status be far behind?
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I am in love with Munk. I pop this CD in my player and it hasn't left since. The blend of hard hitting hip hop beats and smooth electronic melodies, with the just the right dash of funk mixed in, is balanced at that perfect level that caters to both the bubblegum techno ravers and hardcore lovers alike. His stuff is madly addictive.  Before you know it, you’ll be skipping work to listen to Munk.  Not long afterward, you’ll start shooting up Munk in the bathroom. No really, it’s that good.  A perfect blend of irony (as in "Back to Hollywood"), ballads (as in "The Lies We Tell"), and just plain kick ass rock & roll.  The pace changes with every song, keeping you glued to your earphones until the end of the album. Never a dull moment, I swear!  It’s the kind of music that simply oozes coolness.
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Located somewhere comfortably close to Nine Inch Nails and Machines of Loving Grace, Munk's artistry is an accessible mixture of organic electronica and dark hip-hop flavors. The fast-paced, percolating opener "Knucklebones" is a fine example. It riffs along behind a driving drum loop while Munk raps about his badness in full stereo. Samples and syncopation add grit to the mix.

From lyrics to beats, Munk has a complete game. "I'm deep like an existential author" he contends slyly on track 3. The album sounds great, it looks great (slick CGI image of the Anime Sweetheart babe) and Munk's writing is strong enough for each track to have an identity. He nods to Japanese cartoons, Soul Coughing (Mike Doughty does a brief cameo), Fox's Dark Angel, and other stuff that's almost universally appreciated by boys grown older.

Munk's spiffy superhuman ability: production. He cooked up this entire disc on a Mac G3 in his house, and it sounds lovely. His material crackles out of the speakers. Live guitar and drums are perfectly integrated into the mix, while retaining their inherent nastiness. Each song does its own thing but sounds cut from the same cloth. The mix is perfect, and there's no dross: everything's good. Mixing a home-studio CD to this production level is no joke. There's not a major-label studio in LA that could have done any better.

Anime Sweetheart is fine, fine work. It gets progressively more danceable and more memorable as it goes, and that's from a strong start. If you like things that rock and shake, this is what you will enjoy.
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